C.W. LEADBEATER IN RETROSPECT

By HUGH SHEARMAN

It has often been noted that in the period just after the death of a
prominent author his work and reputation suffer a certain decline in
popularity. This often continues for about a generation; and then, if he is not
quite forgotten, there is often some revival of interest in him or he is at least
conceded a certain historic status. One could illustrate this process by many
contemporary examples.

C.W. Leadbeater has not been wholly immune from this fate among
students of Theosophical literature, though his writing have never ceased too
be widely read and regularly reprinted. In the generation which has elapsed
since his passing our ways of thinking and of expressing ourselves have
altered so profoundly with regard to some of the subjects he wrote about,
that the lapse of time seems even greater then it has been. In an age of
rapidly changing values, his own educational training and formative mental
experiences belong to a period that lies ninety or a hundred years in the past.
What is now impressive, therefore, is how timelessly intact so much of his
work remains.

We have come today to take a rather changed view of the nature and
significance of interpretations of "the hidden side of things" offered to us
from various quarters. In effect, we have realized that the "occult" is much
more occult than had perhaps once been imagined. We realize how utterly
impossible it is that a wholly different order of experience should be
conveyed to us in the language and images of our outermost daily lives. It
was one of Mr. Leadbeater's misfortunes that his powers of expression were
so lucid that some of his readers and hearers almost believed that this could
be done and that, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, he had indeed
captured for them and encaged in simple and pedestrian English the glories
and mysteries of "the higher planes".

So appealing was the simplicity of Mr. Leadbeater's way of
expressing things that his words and images were often rendered trite by
other people's use and misuse of them. The quoting and reproducing of his
idiom by others, and the confining by them within that idiom of what he had
to tell, did much to obscure the fact of his immense originality.

C.W. Leadbeater had a personality early formed in a certain way, and
he carried the eccentricities of that personality with him all through his later
life. He wore about him the cloak of a conventionally high-minded Church
of England clergyman, a sturdy conservative, a staunch upholder of Queen
and Empire. It was a personality - or, as psychologists might now call it, a
persona - which he found adequate and did not trouble to change. But
repeatedly he outpassed its apparent limitations, carrying it lightly and
showing himself capable of acting as if it were not there.

To understand him at all it seems necessary to recognize in him a
powerful individually living largely in that wholly different order of
experience of which he was from time to time the interpreter. He was one for
whom the standards of his colleagues and critics often did not exists. He was
able to take simply and naturally decisions which would have cost others
great anxiety and much screwing up of courage. To drop the Church of
England and every security which life seemed to hold for him and throw all
his energies into the work of the Theosophical Society was probably a
relatively easy course for him to take. Having reached a certain stage in the
development of his new understanding of things, any other course would
have been unthinkable to him, and there was probably little sense of conflict.
His tranquil and good humored self-assurance in the most difficult and
delicate situations arose from a "self" more deeply based than that of other
people. He did not reply to critics; he did not defend himself or engage in
controversy or argument; he did not criticize others. All these activities he
regarded as ineffectual and irrelevant to the work that absorbed him. He was
in no two minds about it. To him it was pointless to do these things and so
he did not do them.

Such a person is deeply disturbing to others. His certainty is a
standing reproach to their own instability. He was satisfied that he knew who
he was, where he was going, what he had to do and why; and he was
courteously content that others should similarly do whatever they had to do.
It is an attitude which can render almost frantic those who do not know who
they are and who are psychologically insecure.

The question which, of course, will now most concern those who read
his writings is how far his teachings are true. Here at once it is necessary to
remind ourselves that his own standard or criterion of truth was not always
that of those who may now raise the question. Although a keen upholder of a
certain kind of factual accuracy, C.W. Leadbeater was concerned mainly
with pointing towards that kind of truth which it is not within the scope of
words to express. His view of the factual as something frequently of
secondary interest has to be remembered in judging much of what he wrote.
While those greedy for new facts tend to think of "higher consciousness" as
important mainly as a source of facts, Mr. Leadbeater seems to have felt that
facts are more suitably sought in reference books. "Higher consciousness,"
about which he sometimes wrote, was concerned with that different order of
experience in which, indeed, the fact collecting mind ceases to have a
function and is virtually obliterated.

Concerning the levels of experience which we call "psychic", C.W.
Leadbeater provided a framework of interpretation which has been
extremely influential. Again and again the glimpses that one may oneself
have of the "psychic" aspect of things, or the stories that one hears from
others, can be fitted easily and illuminatingly into the Leadbeater
framework. What he has written provides a satisfying answer. This is not to
say that other aspects of the psyche do not exist to which he paid little
attention. In his own simplicity, he was hardly temperamentally capable of
interesting dreams at their very valid psychological level of significance;
though quite unconsciously he provided many starting points from which
one can build bridges across the apparent gap which lies between the
"psychic" interpretation of the hidden side of things and that
"psychological" interpretation with which we are now so familiar.

It is when he goes into rather deeper or, if one prefers it, higher
spheres of experience that it becomes impossible in any factual sense to
assess what he had to report. Yet even here there is open to us the possibility
of a certain appeal to analogy, a certain testing of capacity to respond to our
own deeper experience. As Count Keyserling, the German philosopher
wrote, expressing himself as a disinterested and uncommitted outside critic:

"He wrote reads what C. W. Leadbeater has to say about these spheres
can scarcely doubt that he is at home in them, for all his statements are so
plausible that it would be more wonderful if Leadbeater were in the wrong."

And Keyserling went on, in his detached if somewhat patronizing
manner:

"I find his writings, of all publications of this kind, the most
instructive, despite their often childish character. He is the only one who
observes more or less scientifically, the only one who describes in simple
straight forward language. Furthermore he is, in his ordinary intellect, not
sufficiently gifted to invent what he claims to see, nor, like Rudolf Steiner,
to elaborate it intellectually in such a way that it would be difficult to
distinguish actual experience from accretions. Intellectually he is hardly
equal to the task. Nevertheless I find again and again statements in his
writings which are either probable in themselves or which answer to
philosophical truths. What he perceives in his own way (often without
understanding it) is full of meaning. Therefore he must have observed actual
phenomena".

The higher "spheres" of experience are by their nature not capable of
being brought down into a system. By definition they lie beyond the capacity
of the systematizing mind. C.W Leadbeater never tried to produce a system,
though others, such as A.E Powell and Alice Bailey, attempted to build
systems our of material that he had provided. His concern was
fundamentally with assisting others to cross over into a different order of
experience. This motive was appreciated by P.D. Ouspensky when he
sympathetically discussed, in his Tertium Organum, C.W. Leadbeater's view
of the fourth spatial dimension.

In a good many of Mr. Leadbeater's books there is included a chapter
upon how the reader may set about awakening the capacity to know these
things directly for himself. To C.W. Leadbeater it seemed quite simple. All
you had to do was to become a complete saint, and then certain psychic
capacities would probably dawn for you. And, if they did not do so, at least
you would have done no great harm meanwhile by becoming a saint! But
always the principle was "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His
righteousness and all these things shall be added unto you". No wonder
some people got rather cross with him,

What C.W. Leadbeater "brought through" about any deeper aspect of
life was necessarily clothed in his own personal idiom and with the contents
of his own mind and memory. His great effort to give an account of physical
matter-embodied in Occult Chemistry - seems to be the record of an
experience put into the language of his time. He referred readers quite
candidly to a book published in 1878 where they would find a picture of the
sort of atom he described. With modern physics his description has no
correlation. Yet his chemistry has an extraordinary self-consistency and
carries, in its vast complexity and incredible ingenuity, many evidences of
being the product of a profound and vivid experience. It is not just
something that was cleverly thought up but seems to represent an
inextricable blend of direct experience and personal idiom.

In each field of interest that he touched one seems to see a vivid and
incommunicable experience working its way down into the details of
personal expression. Even where some of the details have aroused
scepticism by certain inherent improbabilities - as have, for example, some
of the genealogical charts associated with accounts of past incarnations - the
detailed elaborations seems to have been vivid and real. One feels that
fundamentally, and making due allowance for the Leadbeater personality,
the thing described was somehow like that or was capable of being seen by
one individual in that way.

In the same way, in connection with the subject of which he wrote
most reverently and with the deepest evidence of its being beyond any
possibility of easy description - the Masters of the Wisdom - the intensity of
the experience seems to outpass very far the capacity for communication. In
his reverence for Them he gives to the Masters a certain statuesque or
stained-glass window quality. Yet it was from this source that all the most
effective decisions and undertaking of his life drew their inspiration.

Take, for example, one of his greatest achievements, the creation in its
present form of the Liberal Catholic Church. This is a church which differs
from all other Christian churches in that it exists, in effect, to provide not a
religious policy or a creedal teaching but a field within which
a supra-rational experience may be freely sought and found. Its
value thus cannot be deeply known to those who are not in it. It is
not a temperamentally congenial approach to experience for
everybody; but by those who have come to know it deeply its powerful
creative and transforming capacity is appreciated as a matter of
daily experience.

Nearly everybody of experience in the Theosophical Society has on a
number of occasions been approached by people claiming guidance from
exalted personages who are obviously merely the mental creation of the
guided persons. Such synthetic "Masters" are always exuberant in their
approval of the persons who proclaim them or of the undertakings of those
persons. They smile their assent; benignly they nod their heads and break
into portly and long-winded eloquence. All the responsibilities of the world
may be upon them, but they are never in a hurry, never have something else
on hand, when there is occasion to express approval of the opinions or
projects of their devoted followers. Yet there are some who know that when
they experience the truest kind of higher guidance brevity to the point of
curtness is often one of its characteristics.

Some have remarked upon C.W. Leadbeater's capacity to recognize a
potential in other people, his ability to pick out a Jinarajadasa or a
Krishnamurti from what was superficially most unlikely material; but , while
real enough, this capacity of his did not operate according to the standards of
the external world. He was not always or even often concerned with
immediate potentialities or results. In many cases he selected individuals and
gave them attention for a while because he held that this would be likely to
bear fruit in some far distant future. This was something that the casual
spectator of his actions could not really judge. For the rather sensational and
now sometimes deplored public statements of Mrs. Besant and others in
1925 Mr. Leadbeater had no responsibility. He was in Australia at the time,
and those who were with him noted and interpreted his silence when the
news of events at Ommen was received.

One is reminded of a passage in the Bhagavad-Gita (iii.28) where
the true sage is represented as holding that "the gunas move among the
gunas". That is to say, the one who truly sees recognizes that in all that
happens, whether in a distant place or in the heart of another person or in his
own thoughts and feeling, the forces of one vast creative process are at work.
Thus beholding a unity and purpose in all that happens, he is increasingly
open to an intuitive realization of the one Actor within and behind the whole
great work, or of the one living Purpose which is ever fulfilling Itself
through the minutest as well as through the greatest events. This
transforming experience enables him to see the picture in successively new
and different ways which would previously have been unthinkable to him
and thereby to uncover layers of subjective reality hitherto unconscious
within him.

Madame Blavatsky taught with regard to The Secret Doctrine that it
was not devised to provide any final set image of the real but was intended
"to lead towards the Truth". It was not a map but a signpost. Similarly the
Theosophy of any other great teacher can assist first steps on a path of
experience for anybody who responds to it; and that path leads towards a
primary Theosophy which must render unnecessary all secondary
Theosophies of written teachings. Possibly the very lucidity and simplicity
of C.W. Leadbeater's Theosophy, which have made it so suitable and so
helpful for a large number of students, have also given rise to some illusions;
but this is less likely to happen today than when that Theosophy was first
exposed to the personal hopes and enthusiasms of an age markedly different
from our own. The achievement of C. W. Leadbeater is likely to stand on its
merits through a long future and guide many forward on their respective
journeys.